It's Complicated

Murs, France

Well, Pont Julien may have been a relatively simple subject for our workshop group, but soon we were on to a very complicated one. Mid-week, Maggie took us to the walled village of Murs. Lots of architectural elements mean complicated drawing issues, which can cause many of us to get bogged down in the details. Our approach for this session was to paint the color of light and the color of shadow, rather than to paint the objects. We set to work to quickly block in all of the light areas and all of the shadow areas, using a representative color for each. The sun was warm, and most of us chose a yellow/orange tone for the sunlit areas, and a cool blue/lavender for the shadow areas. Here's what my block-in looked like:

Once these shapes were defined, we were to modulate the colors slightly to represent some local colors. But only small modulations were to be done. Maggie reminded us, with a quote that came to be repeated through the rest of the workshop, that the painting was like a wedding, in the sense that everything in it needed to be either "on the Bride's side" (light) or "the Groom's side" (shadow).  This proved to be a great approach for simplifying a very complicated subject. 

I ran out of time before I could bring a decent degree of finish to my painting. Here is where I ended up. I didn't get all of the color relationships right, with the result that the painting looked "chalky". But it was worth bringing home, and I hope to make some corrections in my studio that will make it sing.

Just to give you an idea of our setup, here's a photo of the talented Rachel Egan at work on her painting of Murs:

Everybody loved the painting that Roy Williamson did at Murs. It was a wonderful mix of abstraction and representation. Most of us agreed that we could hang it over our mantel just as it was, and enjoy it for years! Here's Roy with his wonderful painting:

Stay tuned for the final few posts on the workshop!

Lost in Translation

Only three colors: black, white and burnt sienna

One afternoon of the workshop in Provence with Maggie Siner, we were challenged to complete our paintings using only three colors: black, white and burnt sienna. The purpose of the exercise was to emphasize the fact that we painters are translating what we see, not reproducing what we see. In other words, given the limited properties of paints, the colors on our canvas can never be exactly the same as we perceive with our eyes---but if we get the relationships of the colors right, our paintings will nonetheless be convincing. This point is made loud and clear by a limited palette exercise, because there is no way that the colors will come even close to the reality of the subject. As a result, the painting must stand or fall solely on the relationships among the colors on the canvas.

Limited Palette Study #1

This session was a real struggle! I almost drowned in the flood of decisions---what's the lightest light, and how can I mix it with just these three colors? the darkest dark? the brightest bright? To mix each color, I also had to compare it to all the others---was it warmer or cooler? darker or lighter? more intense or less intense? Yikes! This is what painting is always about, but without the customary colors, there is no place to run, no place to hide. I painted two paintings in this session. I drifted so far from shore on the first one (above), that Maggie had to throw me a life preserver, and so I must admit that the colors in the painting pictured above are more her work than mine.

Limited Palette Study #2

My second effort (immediately above) was more convincing. I learned from my mistakes, and was able to translate what I was seeing far more successfully. One of my favorite paintings of this session was done by the talented Audrey Rosen. You can see Audrey below, and her limited palette painting is at the top right of the photo. Her work was so skillful that you can hardly tell that she was using only three colors--the painting is truly convincing!

Audrey Rosen and her paintings--limited palette at upper right

Village Lane
8 x 8
SOLD

This exercise was so instructive that I returned to the scene of the crime after the workshop was over. I could not resist seeing if I could "translate" the scene when using my normal palette. The last two images (right and below) are full color paintings of the subjects in the limited palette exercises. They came together pretty quickly, since I had previously worked out the solutions to most of the big questions. But note that I didn't get to the second scene at the same time of day, so the shadows are very different. 

Shadow Patterns
10 x 8

Seeing Form

Le Pont Julien
(Photo: Lesley Powell)

Moving forward with my posts on the workshop in France, I am devoting this post to the morning we spent at Pont Julien. After several days of painting landscapes and far distances, we were taken to Pont Julien so we could focus on a nearer object. Our focus was  on FORM, and how light on a form creates planes and shapes.

And what a form!  Pont Julien is an exquisite bridge that dates from 3 BC. It was built by order of Julius Caesar, after whom it is named. The bridge has a series of perfectly proportioned arches, and is built of limestone taken from the surrounding hills. Thanks to the marvels of Roman engineering, the stones were set so perfectly that no mortar was required. The bridge carried vehicular traffic until the early 2000's--which makes for two thousand years of continuous use. About this time we are all thinking the same thing: "They don't make 'em like they used to."

Maggie finding her rectangle

But I digress. The point is our painting lesson. The arches of the bridge were perfect subjects for working to capture different planes, and identifying where planes shift. They were also great foils a lesson in composition--learning to arrange our paintings with interesting patterns of darks and lights. How do you make a great composition? The right placement of dark and light shapes. Simple! Or as Maggie says, "The repetition of shapes makes a melody".

Painting architectural elements really makes you realize how fast the sun moves--shadows shifted and light areas became dark, all in the twinkling of an eye. A plein air painter has to be fast! I did my first painting on the "dark" side of the bridge (the west side when it is morning)(photo below). It turned out OK, but was really just a warm up to the real event of the day.

Pont Julien Study I

My best work came when I moved to the other side of the bridge. It was almost blindingly bright in the morning sun. I painted a very high key painting. After laboring for an hour and a half on the first effort, the second  canvas was done in a third of that time. It was one of those things that happens only occasionally, when everything just seems to go right. I was truly "in the zone", painting from the gut, making decisions quickly, not over-thinking. Here is the painting as photographed that afternoon--still with pieces of grit from the scene and masking tape at the corners!

For those of you who are interested in such things, here is a photo of my setup:

And here's a shot of Maggie and some of our workshop group, tired but satisfied after a hard morning's work. Note the most important fashion accessory for plein air painters: a very wide-brimmed hat!

Paint That!

Abandoned ochre quarry near Roussillon
(Photo: Lesley Powell)

One morning during the recent workshop, we were taken to an abandoned ochre quarry near the village of Roussillon. Roussillon is famous for the wide varieties of ochres in its soil. Ochres are naturally occurring earth pigments, which have been used since prehistoric days to make dyes and paints. Depending on the amount of iron oxide and manganese contained, these ochres may tend toward yellow, brown, red or even purple. Ochres have been used to make such artists' paints as burnt sienna, yellow ochre, raw umber, and burnt umber. Nowadays these paint colors are formulated artificially, and the quarry we visited is abandoned. A scattering of pine trees has sprung up among the mounds of colored earth. Truly, it is an other-worldly terrain.

Fellow workshoppers scouting for places to paint in the quarry

I was feeling brave, and clambered up the rocks with my gear, eager to tackle this strange vista. Good thing we had been honing our color skills, because this was a subject guaranteed to throw a monkey wrench into any preconceived notions about landscape painting!  Here is my setup, followed by close ups of my paintings of the morning. I spent most of my time working on the first painting. When I realized that I had just a short time left before the van picked us up, I decided to try a quick abstraction of the subject for my second painting.

My set-up in the quarry

"Ochre Woods"
13 x 7

"Ochre Woods, Abstracted"
8.5 x 5

While on the topic of quarries in Provence, I cannot fail to mention the great artist Paul Cezanne, and his marvelous paintings of the Bibemus quarry (located about an hour south of where our workshop group was painting).  Bibemus was not an ochre quarry, but rather a quarry known for its red sandstone. It was abandoned at the time Cezanne painted it, and the resemblances to our Roussillon quarry are remarkable. I have included images of two of Cezanne's Bibemus paintings below. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more posts about the workshop!

"The Bibemus Quarry
Paul Cezanne, c. 1895

"The Bibemus Quarry"
Paul Cezanne, c. 1896-1897

The Workshop Experience

Waiting for the van, near Joucas

I have just returned from a painting workshop in Provence, France, taught by the inimitable Maggie Siner. Not only is Maggie a gifted painter and teacher, she lived in the Luberon area of Provence for years, so she is intimately familiar with the landscape. Between Maggie and our host David Atkinson (owner of Arts in Provence, and also a talented painter), they always seemed to know the location that would present the best opportunity for understanding and implementing the lesson du jour.

Our first sessions were focused on simplifying the landscape. We were challenged to be selective in framing our subject, taking just one slice of the whole smorgasbord. (As you can see from the top photo, the landscape in the Luberon presents a tempting array of things to paint). After framing our subject, we were to picture it in just three or four simple shapes (i.e., field, trees, mountains, sky, as seen below). We would then create those shapes with gestural brushstrokes, and fine-tune their color relationships. 

This is the subject of my painting shown below.

I have written previously about using this approach, which was introduced to me by Maggie a couple of years ago. It is almost miraculous how little detail is required to make a finished, satisfying painting, if you can start with beautiful shapes and get the color relationships properly keyed. It's a "Eureka!" experience! 

The last photo shows my favorite work of the morning. I thought it conveyed a strong sense of place, and the shapes were pleasing and varied. Wish they could all start out so well! Please check back for upcoming posts...I will be writing about various aspects of the workshop over the next few weeks.

"Luberon Fields, I"
5.5 x 9.5
(c) Lesley Powell

Outside/Inside

Today I am posting about the artistic process I use to translate a small plein air study into a larger studio painting.

"Church Study" 

8 x 6

NFS

This is a close-up of a small painting that I completed on location recently during the Crossnore Paint Out. I loved the gleaming white church in the clearing, but I must confess that all of the different greens presented quite a challenge. I spent more time mixing colors and rejecting them than I did putting the paint on the canvas! In the end, I thought the greens of the church's painted metal roof were "right on". Unfortunately my time ran out (sun going behind the trees), and I could not get satisfied with the architectural elements of the painting. But I was excited about having gotten the color notes right, and so, back home in the studio...

"Come All to Church"

18 x 18

This is an 18 x 18 inch painting (more details here), painted by using the plein air piece as an inspiration and guide. The big painting is more than six times the size of the small one. By using a square format, I had room to show more space around the church, which allows it to breathe. I also had time to plan my composition carefully enough to include the cross atop the steeple--a key element that I loved about the church. And I like the rhythm created by showing the windows of the sanctuary.

There is always something lost, as well as something gained, when taking a small study to the next level. The biggest challenge is to maintain the spontaneity and freshness of the original. In this large painting, I tried to capture the gesture of the roof and the trees with big, bold strokes--which I think helped to preserve the zest of the original. Let me know which is your favorite!

For the curious: My title for the larger painting comes from A. E. Housman's poem "Bredon Hill".

Ode to the Paint Tube

"Blue & Yellow"

6 x 8
(c) Lesley Powell 2013

Ah, the humble paint tube. Seems a very ordinary thing nowadays, but it was a breakthrough in its time, and it revolutionized the course of painting. Renoir is quoted as having said "Without colors in tubes, there would be no Cezanne, no Monet, no Pissaro, and no Impressionism".

As you may may know, oil paint begins to dry out and harden as soon as it is exposed to air. It might stay useable for a day, or two at most. Before the mid-1800's, artists stored their paint in pigs' bladders to avoid exposing it to the air. The bladders were notoriously messy, and tended to burst. They were opened by piercing with a tack. Once opened, they could not be resealed. As you can imagine, the bladders were far too undependable to transport outside the studio.

All of that changed with the advent of the metal paint tube. And we owe it to a fellow Carolinian--John G. Rand, from South Carolina--who patented it in 1841. The metal of the tube was impermeable, and with the screw-on lid it would stay airtight. You could open and close the tube as often as you wished, without the paint spoiling. 

L: Pig's bladder filled with Prussian Blue paint

R: Paint tube

(Photo courtesy V&A Museum)

The first revolutionary aspect of this invention was that paint would last almost indefinitely. Before the tube, when an artist opened a bladder of paint, he needed to use it all before it spoiled. (Oil paint has always been, and still is, quite expensive, and nobody can afford to waste it). Thus, painters of old would paint all of the blue areas of a painting when they opened the bladder of blue--needing to finish before the paint oxidized. Then they would move on to the next color, and do the same. 

With the advent of the tube, painters could open all of their pigments at once. No more worry about wasting paint--the right quantity could be squeezed from the tube, and the tube could be resealed to preserve the rest.  As the publication of the NC Museum of Art says: "Now the painter could work anywhere on the painting's surface at any time...This was absolutely crucial with the Impressionists. They needed to work very quickly to capture fleeting effects of light and weather. This required an intuitive immediate response which could not be limited to one small part of a larger composition."

Here are two paintings by Claude Monet, one of the great Impressionists. Can you imagine painting either one of these if you had to paint all of your blues first, then all of your reds, etc? Impossible!

Monet: "Les Tilleuls a Poissy"

Monet: "Le Grand Canal"

Working all over the canvas simultaneously, as you can see in the above images,  is a hallmark of the Impressionists. Camille Pissarro advised  "Don't paint bit by bit, but paint everything at once by placing tones everywhere." In my own practice, going back and forth between different areas of the canvas is essential to getting the color relationships right. Every color affects the others, especially those close to it, and I cannot imagine how hard it would be to get the relationships right if painting all of each color, one by one.

Eugene Boudin

Painting en plein air

19th century

The second revolutionary aspect of the tube was that paint was now portable. Artists could now paint en plein air, outside on location. More on that in a future post. Stay tuned!